Volume 4, Issue 1 -

French and Latin used to be the two main languages of record in the Merchant Taylors, as well as other London livery companies, as late as the fifteenth century, at least. From the fourteenth century onwards, English was becoming more and more present in this guild’s business accounts, until it replaced both Romance languages as their new official medium of written communication. Seen the inconsistent dates of adoption of English in the Merchant Taylors’ Master and Wardens’ Accounts suggested in the literature, this article applies two different approaches to language shift in the late medieval period in order to analyse and illustrate when exactly the whole Company is supposed to have substituted French and Latin for English forever. As the search of that permanent and communal shift leads to the necessary consultation of financial manuscripts kept as late as the seventeenth century, it is concluded that the construction of a unitary framework for the study of the different language shifts in the London livery companies at different periods would yield more comprehensive results.

Historical sociolinguistics has favoured the interest in tracing heterogeneity and vernacularity in the history of language, reconstructing the sociolinguistic contexts and directions of language change as well as socially based variation patterns in remote speech communities. But this treatment of language variation and change macroscopically, longitudinally, unidimensionally and focused on the speech community as a macro-cosmos can be revealingly complemented with other views microscopically, cross-sectionally, multidimensionally and privileging individuals and their community of practice as a micro-cosmos. This conveys a shift from the study of collectivity and inter-speaker variation to that of individuality, intra-speaker variation and authenticity. The aim of this paper is to show results of the microscopic investigation of intra-speaker variation and the use of stylistic choices as linguistic resources for persona management within the micro-cosmos of late Medieval England, through the application of current multidimensional socio-constructionist models to historical corpora of written correspondence. The study is carried out through the analysis of the behaviour of the orthographic variable (TH) in the letters written by members of the Paston family. In addition to tracing language change, the data obtained from private letters provide us with the possibility of reconstructing the sociolinguistic values in medieval times. Ultimately, this study’s contribution is to account for the social meaning of inter- and intra-speaker variation in the sociolinguistic behaviour of speakers at the individual level as a linguistic resource for identity construction, representation, and even social positioning in interpersonal communication.

This study analyses how fictional languages can be influenced by natural languages exemplified by the use of Yiddish. It shows how a fictional language can be a data source for research on historical development of Western Yiddish (WY) and its sociolinguistic situation. In contrast to the varieties of Eastern Yiddish (EY), which are still spoken today, Western Yiddish was given up during the complex acculturation process of West-Ashkenazic Jewry during the nineteenth century. As a language driven by a pejorative view of language variations and by growing antisemitism, Yiddish found its way into German fiction, where it is still used in contemporary fiction as a means of characterising Jewish figures. This article presents the main results of a corpus study on 53 of such fictional texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Yiddish examples in Yiddish script will be primarily quoted in their original form and then be transliterated following the YIVO romanisation system (cf. Weinreich 1968). It will be shown that reflexes of spoken WY can be found in these imitations of Yiddish. This data can be used as secondary evidence of WY structures. Furthermore, the data gives an impression of the intensity of the language contact situation between German and Yiddish. In addition it gives insights into mechanisms of how German Jews were excluded from the German ideal of a Sprachnation .

Based on letters from prison written by a peasant farmer, this tentative, exemplar study tries to show the interconnection of two sides of the same historical process: the striving for linguistic ‘expression’ and the development of the modern self. The analysis shows that the letters’ author, J. H. Friedrich, succeeded in the creative act of expressing his psychological self on paper when the circumstances pushed him to do so. He communicated complex facts by using a rather elaborate syntax (while his writings also reveal misspellings and an erroneous morphosyntax). However, Friedrich did not archive his pragmatic aim of maintaining his much needed social bonds to his wife, family, and friends. The paper discusses the possibility that this might have been the case because his written style contrasted starkly with the oral communication of his former communities of practice. The study contributes to the third-wave approach in historical sociolinguistics (Conde-Silvestre, J. C. 2016, A ‘third-wave’ historical sociolinguistic approach to late Middle English correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters. In Cinzia Russi (ed.), Current trends in historical sociolinguistics , 46–66. Warsaw & Berlin: de Gruyter) that seeks to present in detail that historical ‘speakers’ are anything but stable carriers of a given language variety but ‘tailor’ their own linguistic styles.